This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to acquiring structured data about users of a social networking system using a composer interface with input fields for receiving the structured data about a user.
Social networking systems aggregate information about users and their relationships to provide a more personalized user experience. Information about the users is often self-reported (e.g., information about the user's interests, activities, and the nature of their relationships with other users). Additional information about users and their relationships with other users also may be collected by the social networking service, such as the number, frequency, and directionality of interactions between users and the various types of interactions which may occur between users, just to name a few. Information about users, their relationships, and interests is valuable, both to users of social networking services (including advertisers who may wish to market products using certain viral marketing campaigns that utilize this information) and to administrators of the social networking service wishing to develop a more personalized experience for their users. Even though a social networking system may collect, and in some cases infer, information about its users, the social networking system may require certain information about its users in order to better understand its users. Conventional systems lack a mechanism for acquiring data from a user via a composer interface that includes input fields chosen based on the systems' data needs.